Bart Wright: One position can symbolize gap in NFL between the penthouse and the basement

A simplistic thought experiment gets us started today. Has there ever been a time when the chasm between the elites and the struggling class has been more blatantly obvious?

If it took you more than a hiccup's length to come up with the right answer, you must not like football very much.

The subject, of course, is the elite teams in the National Football League that have been protecting the golden goose from their franchises from even thinking about going to another team.

Just in the last few weeks, the Baltimore Ravens signed Joe Flacco, the quarterback who took them to the Super Bowl championship, to a $120.6 million contract that figures out to approximately $20.1 million per year. The deal, signed on March 5, made Flacco the highest paid player in the history of the league.

Last week, Dallas signed quarterback Tony Romo, he of one career playoff win behind him, to a 6-year deal worth an estimated $55 million, according to a report by the Associated Press. It seems long ago that Denver secured the signature of Peyton Manning to a contract that pays him $18 million a season.

Next up comes Green Bay's Aaron Rodgers, expected to displace Flacco sometime this week as the newest highest paid player in the history of the league. Rodgers, with a Super Bowl champions pedigree, might make as much as $25 million on his new deal, according to some of the speculators.

Life is good at the top, and don't think for a second that those challenging quarterback negotiations scare other teams away. The teams that don't have quarterbacks able to command those salaries are trying to find one.

What's been happening with the league's elite teams doesn't come into focus until you compare it to what's going on at the bottom with the first 10 teams in the draft.

It's because of these first 10 teams that will be drafting that people always say, with good reason, that quarterbacks often get drafted too high. They do, and they always will until they change the rules to make quarterbacks interchangeable with defensive tackles.

Those first 10 teams drafting, with the exception this year of the Detroit Lions, all need quarterbacks. The last teams drafting in the first round? The winners? They have quarterbacks.

There was a lot of discussion throughout the 2011 college football season about the accomplishments being made by Stanford's Andrew Luck and Baylor's Robert Griffin III. Accordingly, come draft day last season, they were drafted No. 1 and No. 2, in that order.

But the same buzz didn't linger in 2012 around West Virginia's Geno Smith or Southern California's Matt Barkley, both of whom were on teams that finished a few notches below where they had hoped.

West Virginia had a losing record in its first season in the Big 12 Conference and Southern California also had a below par season, for Trojan standards. Despite all that, despite the image football fans may have about Smith and Barkley when compared to Luck and RG3, they will still go high in the draft, not the first and second selections, but up there in the first round.

You can make a case that seven of the first 10 teams choosing in the draft need a better quarterback than they have today. That includes Cleveland, which drafted one last year and, following a change of ownership, may not be convinced Brandon Weedon is the answer.

Consider Jacksonville (second pick), Oakland (3), Philadelphia (4), Arizona (7), Buffalo (8) and the New York Jets (9) all as teams that need to upgrade at the position.

Last week after South Carolina's Pro Day in Columbia, one of the scouts in attendance told me it doesn't matter what the position might be, whenever a team has a need to fill in the draft, the process can't change.

"It's always the same," the scout said, "it's the big math problem, that's how I look at it. There are guys there, you just have figure out the solution; you know the different components to analyze, you just have to go do it and forget about the last big math problem because everyone is special, every one is different."

For instance, consider two quarterbacks in major college programs combining for almost 24,000 yards of passing and 214 touchdowns - numbers ferreted out by cbssports' Pat Kirwin - they'd be worthy of attention for a team in need, right?

Those are the combined numbers of Smith and Barkley. Last year, Luck and RG3 came into the draft with 54 fewer college touchdowns and 4,189 fewer passing yards in college.

A closer look is warranted.

This is nothing new, teams always need quarterbacks to win, but rules changes over the years have made the NFL more of a passing league and placed more responsibility on getting the right guy.

Nobody understands that more than the teams themselves who resisted such opportunities. In 2004, Cleveland decided to take tight end Kellen Winslow, no longer with the team, instead of quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, signed by rival Pittsburgh.

The Dolphins could have taken Matt Ryan out of Boston College in 2008 but thought it would be wiser to select tackle Jake Long, no longer with the franchise. Ryan has the Falcons chasing a Super Bowl and the Dolphins are still wondering if they have the right quarterback.

That same year, Buffalo, still looking for a quarterback, passed on Flacco and Kelvin, a good cornerback but not a franchise saver, which explains why it has taken the Bills so long to regain respectability.

A few teams are going to make selections in this draft that will elevate them to the elites over time, while a few others will not make choices that will keep them buried in failure.

Take your time on the math problem folks, but at the end of the day, just make sure you solve the problem.

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Bart Wright: One position can symbolize gap in NFL between the penthouse and the basement

A simplistic thought experiment gets us started today. Has there ever been a time when the chasm between the elites and the struggling class has been more blatantly obvious?